The Department of History and American Studies is pleased to announce the fourth and final lecture of the Fall 2018 lecture series, “Washington and Moscow: Capitals of the Cold War Past and Present?” Prof. Andrew Friedman (Haverford College) will present his lecture, “Covert Capital: U.S. Empire, Northern Virginia and the Suburban Cold War.”

Abstract: The capital of the U.S. empire in the Cold War was not a city. It was an American suburb. This talk chronicles how the CIA and other national security institutions created a U.S. imperial home front in the suburbs of Northern Virginia after World War II, anchoring a new imperial culture and social world, and making U.S. geopolitics through the routines and spaces of everyday suburban life.

The lecture is open to the public and will be held Tuesday, November 27, 6pm in Monroe 346. Professor Friedman is author of Covert Capital: Landscapes of Denial and the Making of U.S. Empire in the Suburbs of Northern Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

The Department of History and American Studies is pleased to announce the third lecture of the Fall 2018 lecture series, “Washington and Moscow: Capitals of the Cold War Past and Present?” Dr. Stephen Bittner (Sonoma State University) will present his lecture, “Soviet Dissidence, the Moscow Intelligentsia, and the Cold War.” The lecture is open to the public and will be held Tuesday, November 6, 6pm in Monroe 346.

The Department of History and American Studies at UMW is pleased to announce the second event of the fall 2018 lecture series, “Washington and Moscow: Capitals of the Cold War Past and Present?” Dr. George Derek Musgrove (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) will present his lecture, “‘We are headed for some bad trouble’: Gentrification and Displacement in Washington, D.C., 1920s-2018.” The lecture is open to the public and will be held Tuesday, October 23, 6pm in Monroe 346.

The Department of History and American Studies is pleased to announce the first lecture of the fall 2018 lecture series, “Washington and Moscow: Capitals of the Cold War Past and Present?” Dr. Maria Rogacheva (George Mason University) will give the first lecture about Soviet scientific communities and their role in the Cold War.

Dr. Maria Rogacheva earned her Ph.D. in Soviet History from the University of Notre Dame in 2013. Her dissertation won the 2014 Robert C. Tucker/Stephen F. Cohen Dissertation Prize for best doctoral dissertation in Soviet and post-Soviet politics and history. Dr. Rogacheva taught Russian and European history at the College of William and Mary and Beloit College, and was as an Honorary Fellow at the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book, The Private World of Soviet Scientists from Stalin to Gorbachev, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Dr. Rogacheva currently works at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.

This fall semester, the Department of History and American Studies is hosting a 5-part lecture series on the urban histories of Moscow and Washington, and their role in shaping Russian-American relations. Please see the description and schedule for the series below.

1892 Bird’s Eye View Map of Washington, DC

Moscow–Washington: Capitals of the Cold War Past and Present?

Hardly a day goes by when the bizarre spectacle of Russian-American relations does not dominate the news. Russia’s involvement in the 2016 US Presidential election, the wars in Ukraine and Syria, and tensions between Russia and NATO are just a few of the major flash points that drive the two nuclear powers further apart and closer to direct conflict. Meanwhile, in defiance of his own intelligence services and raising questions about his loyalties and motivations, US president Donald Trump pushes for better relations with Russia and its president Vladimir Putin, effectively upending decades of American foreign policy toward the United States’ erstwhile adversary. Have the two countries entered a new Cold War, as many commentators contend, or will their current leaders find a meaningful resolution to their outstanding problems that also addresses the long-simmering animosities of various domestic constituencies and government institutions?

New Moscow (1937) by Yuri Pimenov

This fall semester, the lecture series “Moscow-Washington: Capitals of the Cold War Past and Present?” explores the history of Russian and American relations through the lens of each country’s capital city, how their histories have become entangled, and how they have followed different paths. With their origins in very different national and local histories before the 20th century, Moscow and Washington suddenly intersected during the Cold War as the metropoles of two global, entangled empires that displaced those of Western Europe after World War II. [Read more…]